


Where the Past Comes Back to Life

by TheAutotheist



Series: A Girl, A Guy, and the Never-Ending War [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Female Steve Rogers, Memory Loss, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-15
Updated: 2014-12-15
Packaged: 2018-03-01 13:56:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2775557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAutotheist/pseuds/TheAutotheist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While searching for Bucky after crashing the helicarriers, Steph runs into some Hydra agents who manage to turn her back into her pre-serum self, complete with pre-serum memories. However, Bucky is always the focal point in her life, no matter if she thinks he's captured, dead, or brain-washed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where the Past Comes Back to Life

**Author's Note:**

> Think of this as an alternate ending to A Girl, A Guy, and the War. You probably don't need to read that story to understand this one, but I do make references to events that happen in it.

Steph didn’t know where she was, or how she’d gotten there. Something heavy was in her hands so she let it clatter to the ground. The noise it made when it landed was wrong, but she couldn’t get her eyes to focus on it. She felt so dizzy. It was a good thing there was a car next to her for her to lean on, otherwise she might have fallen over.

She was finally able to make out what had dropped. It was round, and slightly curved, and had painted rings of blue and red around a white star. A shield, her mind finally supplied. It was a circle, in the style of old Greek shields she had seen drawings of in history books, and it was designed to look like the flag. What an odd thing. And she had no idea why she’d been holding it.

Now that she didn’t feel like she was about to fall over she got a good look around her. She was standing on some kind of side street, leaning on a car parked along the curb. But it looked nothing like any kind of car she had ever seen. It was all boxy, and black, and big as a bus, though clearly with only enough room for a handful of people. The street itself was lined with brick buildings and more odd-looking cars. There weren’t any people around, but there was a large charred section of asphalt, and a huge dent in the side of a car across the way from her.

She bent down to look at the shield she had been holding, but then she heard the sound of running footsteps and straightened up to see who was coming.

“Steph! Are you okay? I thought I saw…” The voice trailed off as the man stopped in front of her and got a good look at her. He uttered a string of profanities that had her raising both eyebrows. “Okay, this is bad,” he said at last.

The man was black and was good-looking in a very self-aware way. He also seemed to know her, which was baffling. He was only in his shirt sleeves and a pair of blue jeans, and he was breathing hard like he had just been running very fast.

Steph frowned at him and tried to straighten up, but he was still considerably taller than her. “Who are you?”

The annoyed and frustrated look disappeared and was first replaced by shock, then a frown of his own. “Steph, it’s me, Sam. Sam Wilson. We’ve been tracking down your…” He trailed off when her face didn’t register any recognition. He looked at her for a moment, and then said, “Steph, what year is it?”

“What?” she asked in surprise.

“I think you’ve been hit by something. Can you tell me what year it is?”

Did he think she had some kind of head injury? Her hand immediately went to her scalp and she felt through her hair, but couldn’t find anything. “It’s 1942, of course.”

The man, he had said his name was Sam, she reminded herself, frowned even more, but it seemed to be a bit grimmer. “So that’s what happened.”

Obviously they did know each other, or at least he knew her, even if she had no idea who he was. And she’d apparently been injured somehow. After he managed to convince her they were friends, he stepped away and started talking into a glowing piece of metal, almost like he was talking on a telephone. It was extremely bizarre, but then again, the whole situation seemed bizarre. Ten minutes later, a fast car that was so low to the ground, Steph thought Sam would surely be able to step over it, pulled up in front of them and a woman with flaming red hair got out. She immediately went to Steph.

“Steph, do you know me?”

Steph could feel her eyebrows knit together as she looked between Sam and this new woman. “No. Should I?”

She crossed her arms and studied Steph. “And the year?”

Steph tried really hard not to roll her eyes. She gestured at Sam. “I already told him. It’s 1942.”

“Told you,” Sam muttered from behind the redhead.

Her eyes did a very deliberate once-over of Steph’s appearance. That was when she realized she wasn’t wearing any clothes she remembered owning. She was also wearing jeans, but they were too loose around the hips, and it was only the belt just above her hip bones that was keeping them in place. But they obviously weren’t men’s pants, like she was used to wearing, because they were too curvy. She also seemed to be wearing some kind of woman’s blouse, and it likewise hung loosely on her shoulders. It was a very strange ensemble, and especially strange for her.

The redhead was also wearing pants, she observed, but she didn’t at all look like she was dressed like a man. The bottoms of her pants were tucked into high boots with massive heals. She wore a solid-colored shirt under a leather jacket, and everything was very tight and very form-fitting. The woman was gorgeous, but had a hard edge about her that told Steph that if any man tried to treat her like any other dame, they would be sorry. It was something she could respect, since she didn’t run into many women who could hold their own against men.

“I’m Natasha,” she told Steph at last, and then she looked over her shoulder at Sam. “Let’s take her to the Tower. With all the equipment there, we can probably figure out what happened.”

“What do you mean what happened?” Steph asked, a bit annoyed that she was being talked about and not to.

Natasha didn’t answer her question, and instead ushered her to the car. When she didn’t pick up the American flag shield, Sam bent down and grabbed it like it was really important to someone.

Okay, yes, she could tell right away something had happened as soon as the car pulled out onto the main street. She had no idea where she was, but suddenly a familiar skyline appeared before her. She was in New York, and it couldn’t possibly be New York. Every now and then, a building would appear that she recognized, but everything else was as strange as this car, these clothes, these people.

The Tower turned out to be a building, not actually a tower. It wasn’t shaped like any buildings she had ever seen though, and seemed to be made entirely of glass, and not stone or metal. She didn’t get a very good look at it before Natasha drove into a garage and pushed her into an elevator. They ended up at the top of the building and she gave Steph a quick command to sit on the couch and then went off to find someone.

Sam set the shield down on the coffee table in front of her carefully, reverently. It looked like a prop, but was obviously real. And Steph had no idea why someone would want something that looked like that. Shields were all about symbolism, she had gathered, from the books she read. They were about defending, and also about hiding.

A minute later, another man walked into the room and immediately whistled and said, “Damn, Cap, look at you.” He was shorter than Sam, but still taller than Natasha, and he had a stylized beard that reminded Steph of those rich people who could afford to do silly things like that. Natasha followed him into the room, as well as another redhead, this one impossibly thin with strawberry hair pulled into a high ponytail. She, at least, was wearing a dress, but it hugged her figure like it had been sewn around her. She wore strappy heels and her legs were bare. She wasn’t even wearing stockings.

Steph frowned and looked at the man. “Are you talking to me?” she asked.

He grabbed a chair and dragged it in front of the couch before turning it around and sitting in it backwards. Bucky used to do that, especially when he was trying to annoy authority figures. He always balked at principle. The thought almost brought a smile to Steph’s face, but she was still too confused by the situation.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked.

This time Steph did roll her eyes. She crossed her arms, mostly to hide the way the shirt was too baggy, and leaned back into the couch. “No. I don’t know who any of your people are. Can someone please tell me what’s going on?”

“You think it’s 1942, right?”

“It _is_ 1942,” she corrected him, and didn’t blink or break eye contact, just stared him down.

“Hate to break it to you, Cap, but it’s not. It’s 2014.”

“Stark!” Natasha said.

“What? She was going to find out one way or another.” He glanced back at Natasha and found two redheads with unamused expressions on their faces.

Steph frowned as something pinged in her memory. “Stark?” She looked him over again, and then she could see the resemblance. “Are you related to Howard Stark?”

Stark turned and looked back at her, obviously surprised. Maybe they were expecting her to not know anything. But she knew lots of stuff, she just didn’t know how she supposedly got from 1942 to 2014, especially because that was impossible. “I’m his son,” the man said. “Tony Stark.”

Steph sat up in surprise. “That’s not possible. I just saw Howard Stark live at the expo. He can’t be much older than me. There’s no way he could have an adult son. And you… you’re probably even older than he looked.”

“Told you. It’s 2014.” Before he had seemed amused, curious. Now he seemed annoyed. Perhaps it was because she brought up Howard Stark. “The expo…” he mused. “And you remember everything before that?”

“Of course I do. I don’t have amnesia or anything. I went to the expo cause it was…” she paused, realizing she didn’t really want to discuss her personal life with a bunch of strangers. But they did seem to know her, and something had definitely happened. “It was Bucky’s last night before shipping out…”

“Bucky?” Stark asked. He frowned, and everyone else in the room except for Natasha reacted. “You mean Sergeant James Barnes, right?”

“Yes…” Steph said slowly, suddenly extremely suspicious. These people knew something about Bucky. The tension in the room was palpable. Whatever it was, it was bad. But she just couldn’t bring herself to ask.

“So what’s the last thing you remember?” Stark asked.

Steph looked at him for a moment and glanced back at the women. Natasha looked calm, but had her arms crossed under her chest. The other woman whose name Steph didn’t know frowned and seemed upset by something. She glanced at Sam out of the corner of her eye and could tell he had tensed up like he was ready for a fight.

“I went to the expo with Bucky. He…” She started to tell them about his dates, about them arguing, but then thought they didn’t need to know. “We parted ways there, and I, um, well I’d been trying to enlist, myself.” She held up her hands before anyone could say anything. “I know, I know. I’m a girl, and I can’t. But I tried anyway.” This time, a dark look came over Natasha’s face, and the other woman looked like she wanted to protest. “I met Dr. Erskine…” She looked out the window, and found the memories after that felt a little fuzzier, even though they’d only happened days ago. “Got into this special new program with the army… They put me through basic training, away from the other soldiers. Then we went back to Brooklyn for…” Steph frowned, as the memory started to come back. Machines, an underground lab. Lots of government officials. “The procedure. Oh!” She turned back to Stark. “Howard Stark was there again. But I didn’t talk to him. And then… then…” Steph crossed her arms again and looked down. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t remember anything after getting into that pod. “Did something go wrong with the procedure?”

Stark huffed out a breath in exasperation. “No, the procedure went perfectly as planned. They turned you into a super soldier.”

Steph looked around at the various people in the room. “Then, I don’t understand…”

“Tell me what happened.” The command wasn’t directed at her. Stark looked up at Sam.

“We were…” Sam glanced down at her, and then looked back at Stark. “Found a Hydra unit, and we were fighting them, like usual. They had this special gun, and at first I thought it was one of those old Tesseract weapons, from the SSR files. But it wasn’t. Cap got hit by it, and…” He waved his hand at her, to indicate how she looked.

Stark leaned back, anchoring his hands to the back of the chair in front of him. “Seems like they couldn’t figure out how to take away Steph’s strength, so they found a way to… revert her timeline, send her back to the moment before she became Cap.”

“Why do you keep calling me that?” Steph asked, a bit annoyed.

Stark looked at her again, considering. “Like I said, the procedure worked. You were the world’s first super soldier. But the doctor who designed the serum, Hydra killed him. So you were the only one.”

Steph stared at him. “Erskine is dead?”

Stark nodded. “You became a… what did you call yourself? A showgirl for some senator, to sell bonds. Captain America.”

“Excuse me? Captain America? That’s…”

“War propaganda. But it stuck.”

“So I… I was finally strong enough to fight and still people weren’t letting me?” Steph crossed her arms again. “The whole point of the procedure was to fight in the war!”

“Yeah, that’s what you finally did.”

“I did?”

Stark nodded. “You were doing some USO shows in Europe and found out your friend was captured.”

Steph’s eyebrows rose up into her hairline. She swiped her tongue across her lips, wetting them. Was this the bad thing, the reason they had exchanged glances? “Bucky? Is he… was he okay?”

“Well, you saved him, and a bunch of other soldiers.” Steph noticed that he didn’t exactly answer her question, but he didn’t avoid making eye contact either. The strawberry blonde woman behind him shifted uncomfortably, but no one else reacted. “And then you formed this team, the Howling Commandos. And you changed the war by taking down Hydra.”

Steph glanced back at Sam. He had mentioned Hydra a moment ago, and Hydra apparently killed Dr. Erskine. “Hydra? They’re Nazis? Or, were?”

“Yeah,” Stark said. “Evil Nazi scientists, from my understanding.”

“So I was able to do some good? I was able to fight? I was able to help?” Steph leaned forward and planted her palms on the edge of the couch.

“Yeah, Cap. You became an icon for the American war effort. A hero.” Stark’s lip quirked in a half smile. She wondered if he had thought of some personal joke in his head.

She licked her lips again, almost afraid to ask. “And Bucky? What happened after I rescued him?”

“He was one of the Howling Commandos. Your right-hand man on missions.”

Steph smiled lightly, to herself. “He had my back.” It wasn’t a question. If what Stark was saying was really true, then of course Bucky would join her team and watch her back. He always had. “And?”

Stark frowned. He glanced away, and so did the woman behind him. Natasha continued to look at her levelly, and she didn’t turn to see Sam’s expression. So there was still a bad thing.

“What happened to him?” Her fingers dug into the couch cushions. “Tell me.”

“He fell,” Stark said. Natasha looked at the back of his head and frowned, like she was displeased with what he said. “On a mission. He fell off a train, on a bridge. They never found his body.”

Steph’s breath caught in her throat, and her chest felt tight. “No…” She wasn’t sure if she said it out loud or if she only thought it. That was it. That was the bad thing. That was what she had thought but had been too afraid to acknowledge. That he would be dead. Even worse, he had died following her, apparently. She lifted her hand and could see it was shaking, so she ran her fingers through her hair, repeatedly, trying to still the tremor. Bucky was her whole world. And she had seen him only weeks ago. He had only just been shipping out. And now they were telling her he was dead.

“Stark…” Natasha said warningly, and Steph barely caught it, so wrapped up as she was in her thoughts. Stark turned and shot her a nasty look.

“You went down a little while after that, while taking out a Hydra plane and their leader. You had to crash the plane into the ice. But it didn’t kill you. It froze you. It was only a few years ago that they found you, Cap, and thawed you out.” Stark got up and turned the chair back around. He reached back and grabbed the thing the other woman had been holding. Steph had assumed it was a folder, but it looked more like some kind of metal picture frame. Stark turned it around and handed it to Steph.

It was heavier than it looked. On it was a photo. It took Steph a moment to realize the person in the picture was her, but with a more filled-out face, taller, with muscles, and emphasized bust and curves. “It’s in color…”

Stark rolled his eyes. “Of course that would be your first response.”

Steph looked over the photo. She was wearing some kind of uniform, made up of leather and canvas, with vertical stripes of red and white going up her stomach, to a blue bust with a white star on her chest. She had a shield on her arm. It was the same star-spangled shield lying on the coffee table now. “This is me. I really… I really did become a super soldier.”

“Yeah,” Stark said. He ran his finger across the glass and the image slid sideways to be replaced by a black and white picture of her with a helmet on, standing next to Bucky, who was wearing a blue uniform with his Sergeant’s pin on the shoulder.

Steph reached out as if to touch the glass, but stopped herself. She couldn’t even imagine what must have been going through her head when this picture of taken. What it would have been like to actually go over there and fight. To watch Bucky die. She gripped the edges of the device tightly.

“Stark,” Natasha said again, but Steph didn’t register it. She nodded her head towards the door and walked back out. Sam followed, and a moment later so did Stark. But the other woman walked over and sat down on the couch next to Steph.

“Here, let me show you how this works. I’m Pepper, by the way.” She smiled and gently took the device from Steph and tapped the screen a few times, pulling up other photos from the war. After a little direction, Steph figured out how to look through them. There were also photos from these shows Stark spoke of. There were photos of the other Howling Commandos. Steph looked at their faces, trying to find something she recognized.

There were also notes, reports. She found the one with her own name on it, about how Bucky had died. She read it over twice. Bucky covered her, and Bucky got killed for it.

She took a shaky breath in, and it sounded like a sob. So she set the thing down on the table and covered her face with her hand. She hadn’t even cried when her mother died, or at the funeral. She wasn’t that kind of girl. But that didn’t stop warm tears from running down her face. She quickly rubbed at her cheeks with the heels of her hands and pressed her palms into her eyes, willing the tears to stop. But as soon as she pulled her hands back, she thought of Bucky’s eyes, of how he looked the last night she remembered seeing him, of how it must have been to fall to his death, and then a fresh wave of tears came. She scrubbed at her face and just wanted them to stop. But every time she thought she would finally stop crying, she thought of something else, and it hurt all over again. So she kept the heels of her hands pressed into her eyes and tried not to breathe too loudly, afraid it would turn into real sobbing.

Pepper, for her part, didn’t say anything until Steph lowered her hands again. And then she pushed a box of tissues towards her. Steph had seen when women cried and they tried to daintily dab at their eyes. So instead, she grabbed a handful and rubbed her face hard, even though she knew her eyes had to be red. She couldn’t breathe through her nose with how stuffed up it was, and she knew that would be bad for her asthma.

“I’m sorry,” she said shakily. “I’m not normally emotional like this…”

“It’s okay,” Pepper said softly. “Anyone would be upset upon learning the person they’re in love with is dead.”

Steph looked at her in surprise. “I’m not… How did you…”

Pepper smiled kindly, but sadly. “It’s a bit obvious from how you talk about him. Also, I know something about being around someone for years without admitting how you feel.”

“I…” But Steph couldn’t think of how to react to that, so she closed her mouth.

“You may have also mentioned it to Tony before. I think you were…” She frowned and glanced at the door to the other room, where the three must have still been talking. “I think you said you were together after you rescued him, but it was never in any records about Captain America.”

“We were?” Steph asked hopefully. She kept wiping her eyes and nose with even more tissues. God, she felt like she was leaking. “I hope we were… I wish I’d’ve told him before he left… I was… I was stupid not to, when I knew I could never see him again.”

“Steph…” Pepper said quietly. She put her hand on Steph’s shoulder and squeezed gently. “I’ll leave the tablet here. You can look through the information. But I need to talk to Tony.”

Steph nodded numbly and looked back at the device, a tablet, she supposed.

Pepper got up a minute later and smoothed her skirt down. She left Steph sitting on the couch with the tablet propped against her knees and her feet up on the couch. She was still sniffling and occasionally pulled tissues out and wiped at her nose or eyes. Pepper had never seen Steph liked this. She had always seemed so strong, and always held her emotions close to her chest. But it made Pepper wonder how she must have reacted the first time she thought Barnes had died.

Which brought her to the thing that was troubling her.

She walked down the hall and found the conference room where Tony, Natasha and Sam were standing around a table talking about what to do. She stepped in and stopped beside Tony before crossing her arms. “Tell her,” she said firmly.

Natasha turned to look at her, and Tony sighed. “We couldn’t just dump that piece on her.”

“She thinks he’s dead. You just told her the man she’s in love with is dead. Tell her he’s not.”

“And what?” Tony rounded on her. “Say he actually was captured by Hydra and turned into a psychopath assassin and that he tried to kill her repeatedly before disappearing?”

“Yes,” Sam said.

“As long as she thinks he’s dead, she’s got no hope,” Pepper said. “If she knows he is alive, even despite all the other things, then she’ll have hope.”

“How do you think she’ll react to hearing her boyfriend doesn’t remember her and tried to kill her?”

“She’ll just be happy he’s alive,” Sam said. “Why do you think we’ve been trying to find him? Cause Steph is never going to give up on him, no matter what. So even hearing that he beat her to a pulp, as long as he’s alive, will make her happy.”

Tony held up his hands. “One step at a time. The main problem here is that Steph isn’t Captain America right now. She doesn’t even remember anything after 1942. We have to fix that first. She can’t exactly go looking for the Winter Soldier like this.

“You have to tell her eventually,” Pepper said.

“Fine,” Tony said. “But first let’s figure out how to fix this.”

Steph got distracted from Bucky’s death when she found articles and photos about this alien invasion she had fought in Manhattan. It was unbelievable, even after accepting everything else. Stark was there too, in a flying metal suit. There were others, Natasha among them, but still a small team. Sam wasn’t one of them, she noticed. She wondered when he came in. It was obvious Stark and Natasha knew her from fighting off this invasion.

When they came back, she immediately bombarded them with questions, and they didn’t avoid them, which she had not been expecting. Maybe they were still avoiding something, though. But she couldn’t imagine anything worse than Bucky being dead.

They ushered her into some kind of lab and did a whole bunch of scans and tests that Stark was sure would be able to tell them what happened to apparently turn her back into the skinny girl she had grown up as. Though since it was how she had always been, it was hard to picture being big and strong or any other way.

After, Stark insisted she stay at the Tower while Sam and Natasha went off to try to track down the Hydra agents who had attacked them and get their hands on the weapon that had apparently done this to her. Stark stayed holed up in the lab and Pepper found her a change of clothes to sleep in that she wouldn’t be swimming in. She offered to stay and talk, but Steph wanted to be alone. However, Pepper left the tablet.

Steph sat on the bed that was so much larger than any bed she had ever seen, curled up into as small a space as possible against several pillows. She looked down at a picture of Bucky she had found on the tablet. It was his deployment photo, from his army file. He was wearing his dress uniform, like he had been when she last saw him, and his hat was tilted back slightly. She ran her finger over his face, mindful not to touch too hard in case the tablet did something. There was a cocky gleam in his eyes that she noticed was absent in later pictures from the war. There had been a couple photos of him smirking, like he always would, but the war had already stolen something from him.

From what she had read, it wasn’t just that he’d been captured by Hydra. He’d been tortured. She’d found him strapped to a table. And it was so hard to picture that, to force that image into her brain, because it must have been awful, seeing Bucky like that. But she would rather see him like that, than have him be dead.

She must have fallen asleep like that, clutching the tablet with the picture of Bucky. Because the next thing she knew, she woke up suddenly, and wasn’t immediately sure why. She shifted slightly and felt a crick in her neck from falling asleep sitting up, and straightened out. The tablet was dark, so she set it carefully down on the bed beside her. She was unsure how to bring back the picture of Bucky, and she didn’t want to break anything.

That was when she realized she wasn’t alone in the room. The window was open. When Steph turned her head to look at it, she saw a man with long, shoulder-length hair, dressed in black, but his left hand gleamed. She should have been afraid, but she was only surprised. He stood staring at her and didn’t make any move to attack her at all.

She opened her mouth to ask who he was and what he wanted, but then the clouds that had been blocking the moon blew away, and moonlight shined through the window, illuminating his face enough for her to make out his features. The question she had been about to ask fell from her lips and her jaw hung open in shock.

He looked so different, long hair and stubble, and so much hardness in his expression, but it was unmistakably Bucky. Bucky, who everyone had told her died in the war. Bucky, who would be dead by now even if he hadn’t fallen.

“Bucky…” she breathed out at last, and rose up onto her knees.

Before she could move towards him, though, his eyes darted to the door, and Natasha’s voice yelled, “Steph, get down!” She heard the click of a gun and turned to see Natasha had two pistols pointed at Bucky.

“Natasha, wait!” Steph said as urgently as she could.

Bucky must’ve done something, because Natasha fired. Steph whipped her head around in time to see Bucky lift his left arm up and to hear a ping. He jumped out of the open window and Steph cried out, partly in shock, and partly in despair. She didn’t want him to go.

Natasha darted across the room and looked out the window, then down at the ground. She pulled the window closed firmly and turned to look back at Steph. “Tony is just going to love that the Winter Soldier was able to get past his security,” she muttered to herself.

Steph was still sitting on her knees, in the middle of the bed, having been unable to move during the short exchange. She scrambled out of the bed and stood in front of Natasha. “What the _hell_ ,” she said slowly, “was that?”

Natasha looked at her as if she was surprised to see Steph standing in front of her. And then the mask came down, a perfect poker face.

“That was Bucky!” She waved frantically at the window. “That was Bucky and you told me he was dead! And you knew who he was and you told me he was dead!” she screamed. “You knew!” She shoved Natasha hard. “You knew he was alive!”

Natasha didn’t react to being shoved. She took one step back, but then righted herself again. “Yes. For the record, I was against not telling you. And Stark didn’t lie, necessarily. He said Barnes fell, which he did. But he survived the fall.”

“What happened?” Steph ground out through gritted teeth. Her hands were shaking with how hard she was clenching them at her sides.

“He fell off the train, and Hydra found him. From the records you have collected, it seems he was injured, and they had to replace his left arm with a cybernetic one.” That was the gleam and the ping. “They brainwashed him.” A hard edge came to her voice, and it wasn’t just because she was talking about something that had happened to someone else. She wasn’t that empathic, Steph realized. “Turned him into a weapon. He became a very renowned assassin in the intelligence community. He was legendary mostly because no one knew who he was, or how the same person managed to keep appearing across decades. It turns out Hydra had him on ice when they didn’t need him. The two of you made a set.” She looked at Steph’s face. “We encountered him a few months ago. After discovering that Hydra hadn’t died in World War II, as everyone had thought. They sent the Winter Soldier after us to stop us, and that was when you figured out he was your old friend. We took down Hydra’s plan of mass murder, and you fought him again. He almost killed you, and you would have let him.” There was a bitter roughness in her voice, as if she was mad at Steph about that. “But you said he ended up saving you, when the Helicarrier you were on crashed into the Potomac. You would have drowned, but he apparently dragged you to shore and left you there.” She paused. “That was the last anyone has heard from him. You and Sam have been trying to track him down. That was what you were doing when you were attacked by Hydra tonight.”

Steph realized she was breathing hard. She was so angry when Natasha started her story that she thought her vision was going to white out. She had calmed a bit, though. “So then what does this mean? That he came here tonight?”

Natasha’s lip quirked, but she didn’t commit to an expression. “I don’t know. Maybe he heard what happened to you and came to see for himself.”

“He wasn’t going to hurt me,” Steph said, completely sure.

“You don’t even remember what fighting him was like.”

“But I know Bucky. I may not know what happened to him, but I know this. He wasn’t here to kill me, or attack me. And you shot at him!” She glared at Natasha again.

“It wouldn’t have killed him,” she said calmly.

“But you made him leave. If I really have spent months looking for him, and he came to see me, even if it’s cause of all this,” she waved her hand in front of her, “then that’s something. Now he’s gone!”

“Steph,” Natasha said, still with that annoyingly calm voice. “If he came once, then he’ll come again. The fact that he was able to get in is a security risk.” She looked at Steph and then smiled like she was amused. “I guess Tony was right. The bigger issue is figuring out how to undo what was done to you. Your search for the Winter Soldier will have to be put on hold.”

Steph huffed in indignation.

Natasha left a few minutes later, after making sure the window was securely locked. She told Steph to get some sleep, but after that, she wasn’t sure she would be able to, even though as soon as she thought about it, she was tired. So she laid down on her side, facing the window, and fell asleep watching it, waiting for Bucky to try to come back.

When Steph woke up in the morning, the window was still locked and sunlight was streaming in. She shifted uncomfortably and immediately could feel how stuffy her nose was and the thickness in her throat. Great. All that crying last night had made her sick. Wasn’t that just her life?

She sighed and pushed herself up. After one more glance at the window, she grabbed the tablet and wandered out of the room. She wanted someone to show her how to read about what exactly had happened a few months ago. She wanted to know everything that had happened to Bucky.

She only got lost twice before she found the main common area with the couch and what looked like a kitchenette. She immediately went for that, hoping she could find some tea, or if she was lucky, canned soup. She wasn’t the first one, there, though.

Natasha was there, sipping coffee. Steph froze in her tracks when she caught sight of her. But it was too late to retreat. Natasha had her eyes fixed on Steph and watched her over the rim of the coffee mug, radiating collected coolness. Steph wondered when this woman possibly had time to sleep.

Finally, she sighed and walked over, trying not to sniffle or breathe too loudly through her cold. “Morning,” she said as neutrally as she could manage, though it did come out nasally.

“Sick?” Natasha asked.

“Seems like it.” Steph reached up and opened a cabinet at random, hoping for something.

“Here.” Natasha reached past her and opened another cupboard, before pulling out a box of tea. It said something about throat soothing. She filled a tea kettle and set it on the stovetop. After a moment, she said, “We found those Hydra agents who attacked you, and we got their gun. We had just gotten back when the sensors went off because the Winter Soldier had broken in.”

Steph nodded, not sure if she was apologizing, and unsure that she would forgive her even if she did. The kettle whistled and she poured the steaming water over tea in a mug.

“Tony looked at it and said he can possibly engineer it to undo what it did to you. You’ll go back to being Captain America, and you’ll get your memories back.”

That would be more convenient than having to read about everything that had happened. Or than making someone tell her. It was obviously a sore subject.

“No possibly about it.” Steph turned to see Stark standing in the doorway, smirking in a very self-assured way. “Totally nailed it. Worked on it all night. I can turn you back at any time.”

Steph frowned and sipped her tea. It did soothe her throat. “You worked all night?”

“He does that,” Natasha said.

Stark waved off the question like it was normal and didn’t matter at all.  “So should we fire this thing up?”

“Um… no offense, but I would rather not be shot by a magic gun by a guy who’s running on sleep deprivation.” She frowned. “Unless I’m imposing and you want to get rid of me. I can always leave and come back after you get some sleep.”

Stark laughed at her. And then _Natasha_ laughed at her. “No, Cap,” Stark said, “you can stay as long as you want. I’ve always said that. Oh, right, you don’t remember. But trust me, my science is even better when I’m working on no sleep.”

Steph looked between them and then finished off her tea. She set the mug down on the counter. It had made her feel better, and luckily she didn’t seem to be coming down with a head cold, just a sore throat. “Well, okay, then…”

He waved her back to the same lab where he’d done tests and scans the previous night. The gun was on the table, and it was bigger than she thought it would be, much bigger than any rifle she’d ever seen in the newsreels. It was secured on a tripod, and pointed at a platform with a circle and a cross on it. There were wires coming out of the gun and running into some kind of equipment or machinery. Whatever it was, the technology was beyond her.

“You sure this will work?” she asked, nervous again.

“Course,” Stark said casually. He walked around the gun and fiddled with some switches on the machinery. “Whenever you’re ready, Cap.” He indicated the platform, which stood only a few inches off the ground.

Steph walked over and tentatively stepped up onto the platform. She moved so she was staring down the barrel of the gun. Stark adjusted it slightly and looked at her.

“Ready?”

Rather than answer with words, Steph took a breath and nodded, grabbing fistfuls of the sweatpants she wore and squeezing them at her sides.

“Okay. Three… two… one.”

There was a blast of yellow light and Steph expected to be knocked off her feet, but instead it went right through her. She was aware of her body changing, but it wasn’t as painful as the first time. It was a good thing she was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, because she grew and filled out once again. She had expected her memories to come back all at once, like her body, but they didn’t. They came back slowly.

She remembered the procedure. She remembered watching Dr. Erskine get shot, chasing the Hydra agent down through the streets of Brooklyn. She remembered doing all those shows to sell bonds, and the USO shows. She remembered finding out about the 107th and breaking into that factory. She remembered freeing prisoners and finding Bucky. Oh, how she found Bucky, delirious and strapped to a table. She remembered kissing him for the first time. She remembered spending days getting back. She remembered kissing Bucky for the second time. She remembered being with him, sneaking around with him, making love. She remembered the Howling Commandos, and their missions.

She remembered watching Bucky fall.

She remembered hijacking the Valkyrie, the _Tesseract_ , telling Peggy over the radio that she regretted never telling Bucky she loved him. She remembered waking up, Nick Fury, New York all strange and new and different, Nick Fury again with a mission for her. Meeting the other people who would become the Avengers. Arguing with Tony Stark. Desperately fighting to keep the Helicarrier in the air. The goddamn Tesseract again. Fighting against aliens, becoming part of a different team. She remembered seriously joining SHIELD, going on missions, even when she didn’t agree with everything they did. She remembered SHIELD trying to kill her, finding out Hydra had survived all along.

She remembered seeing Bucky’s face again for the first time. That soulless, blank expression that looked right through her. She remembered fighting him again, really fighting him, in what could be to the death. Getting that chip in place to stop Hydra’s Project Insight. She remembered thinking she was too damn tired to keeping fighting and letting the Winter Soldier beat her bloody. She remembered “Cause I’m with you til the end of the line.” She thought she remembered falling, and watching a metal hand reach for her.

She remembered waking up in the hospital. She remembered all the files she had memorized that told all the awful things that had been done to Bucky, and that he had been forced to do. She remembered searching and searching and searching, and mostly finding Hydra cells, but never finding Bucky. And she remembered watching Sam move to tackle the Hydra agent who had pointed a large gun of some kind at her, and being unable to raise her own shield in time. And a flash of yellow light…

Steph slowly unclenched the sides of her sweatpants, but the fabric was bunched up from how tightly she had been gripping it. She let out a long, slow breath. Her throat didn’t hurt anymore. Seemed the super soldier serum even managed to fix the cold she had developed in the twelve hours she was back in her old body.

“Cap?” Tony asked cautiously. “How you doing over there?” The gun was powered down, and the computers it was connected to were asleep. How long had she been standing there?

“I’m okay,” she said, and was pleased to hear how steady her voice was. She rotated her wrists and tested out her shoulders, satisfied with the way the muscles moved. “I’m me again. I remember what happened.” She smiled at him. “Thanks, Tony.”

He sighed in relief. “Good. I didn’t want to think about facing the next world crisis without Captain America.”

“Are you okay, Steph?” Nat asked.

Steph looked over at her and stopped stretching. There was a silent question on her face. “Yes, I will be. I’d forgotten what it was like to be… well, how I was before.”

“I imagine many of us do not want to return to our past selves.” She looked across at Tony. Tony glanced at her and then nodded at Steph.

They were quiet for a moment so she decided to step down from the platform. The door opened and Sam walked into the room. “You all are up early. Oh, Steph, you’re back to normal,” he said when he caught sight of her.

She smiled and nodded, before heading for the door herself. “Not that it hasn’t been a pleasure, everyone, but I think I would like to head home now. Thanks for tracking that thing down, you two,” she said to Nat and Sam. “And thanks for figuring out how to change me back, Tony.” He inclined his head once in acknowledgement of her thanks. She rushed out of the room and went back to the bedroom she had been staying in. It only a took her a few minutes to change back into her clothes from the previous night. She grabbed her shield on the way out and was down on the street in less than five minutes after leaving the lab.

It was still early enough that not many people were out so she got blessedly few looks for the shield. It took her almost no time to get to the apartment she had in Manhattan, that she had been making use of while they followed a lead in New York. As soon as she got in, she dropped the shield on the floor and slid down with her back against the closed door.

To say it had been a hard day would be an understatement. It wasn’t hard in the way fighting was hard. It wasn’t being outnumbered and outmatched and still managing to win. It wasn’t hard like learning about Hydra and Zola was hard. It was emotionally hard, on such a basic level. She had been thrown back into a body that she had forgotten how to live in. She had had to relive things she thought she had accepted. She had to find out twice that Bucky had died, once when she was told, and once when she remembered. And then she had to go through discovering he actually wasn’t again. This was more than a person should go through in one lifetime.

Steph huffed out a half-assed chuckle and leaned forward to rest her elbow on her knee and run her hand through her hair. Maybe what she had could be considered two lifetimes. She might as well have died in 1945, and started a new life in 2011.

This was why she had to get out of the Tower. They’d already seen her weaker than she ever wanted anyone to see her. She knew they wouldn’t judge her for it, that they understood. But she hated being that way. She had worked so hard to get away from the skinny girl she had been before.

And there was one more reason. Stark Tower had too much security.

She stilled as she seemed to sense more than hear Bucky come into the apartment. Slowly, she lowered her hand and looked up. He stood maybe five or six feet away, just out of reach. She leaned her head back against the wooden door and looked up at him.

“Hi…” she said quietly.

He didn’t say anything; he just watched her.

She rested her forearms on her knees and let her hands dangle between her legs. “I hoped you would come.”

“I could be here to kill you.” His voice was rough, probably from nonuse.

"But you're not." It wasn't a question, it was a statement.

"No, I'm not."

Steph tilted her head slightly, letting it roll against the back of the door. “So then why are you here? Why did you come last night?” She paused. “I assume it’s because what happened to me, but…”

He looked at her for a moment, but he didn’t move any closer. “I couldn’t figure out memories that were coming to me. Sometimes you were…” he nodded towards her, “like this. Big, muscles. Some memories… you looked small, skinny, sick. I couldn’t understand how you could look like both. I thought it was two different people, but they looked the same. Same face. I thought there was something wrong with my head.”

She met his eyes and could see the confusion that had been there. So he had started to remember on his own, even though he still stayed away.

“I have been keeping track of Hydra’s communications.”

“Wait, you what? You know how they communicate?” Steph sat up slightly. “No, that’s not the point. Sorry, you were saying…”

While his expression stayed the same, there was a glimmer in his eyes like he was amused. “I heard they created a device specifically to stop Captain America, and they were successful in using it. But before they had a chance to kill you, your allies took you to Stark Tower. I thought you were injured, so I checked on you. Stark obnoxiously designed that building so it faced away from any other buildings with a decent line of sight. So I had to scale the balcony.” He paused and tilted his head slightly. “I wanted a quick look, to assess your injuries. But you weren’t injured. You looked… like the other version of you from my memories. So I wanted a closer look.”

“That’s when I woke up.”

He nodded and was quiet for a moment. The look he gave her was the same look he had given her the previous night, that slightly blank, but curious expression. “And then Natalia came in.”

Natalia. The same name Zola had used when identifying Natasha inside the secret bunker under Camp Lehigh. Steph had figured that was Natasha’s real name. Interesting that was how Bucky chose to refer to her. “Sorry she shot you.”

He shrugged one shoulder. It was the right one, not the metal one. “It was an understandable precaution. She was not aiming to kill.”

“If she had been?”

“She wouldn’t have killed me.” The look he gave her was cold, as if the part of Bucky that had remembered Steph was retreating into the calculating persona of the Winter Soldier.

“What would you have done if she hadn’t shown up?” Steph asked neutrally.

Bucky blinked, and that cold look cleared from his face. He looked more like Bucky again. “I don’t know.”

“I didn’t remember anything that had happened,” she admitted. “I thought you were dead. So I probably would have done something stupid like try to… throw my arms around you or something.” She readjusted her feet on the floor, but kept her arms propped on her knees loosely. “Would you have attacked me?”

“No,” he said quickly, almost before she had a chance to get the question out. “I’m not… I’m better now. I remember a lot more. I know who you are. I know who… James Barnes was.”

Steph frowned and couldn’t help asking, “Did you know I’ve been looking for you? Ever since you left me on the bank of the Potomac.”

“I know. I’ve been watching you. I checked on you in the hospital, before you woke up, to make sure you really had survived.”

“You what!” Steph surged forward and had one palm on the floor to push herself up, and one leg under her, before she managed to stop herself. Bucky had stilled at her sudden movement, but he hadn’t moved away. She carefully picked her hand up off the floor and crossed her legs under her, letting her head fall back against the door again. Bucky relaxed, just a miniscule amount. “How the hell did you get passed Nat and Sam? And all the armed guards, for that matter!”

He shrugged again. “It’s what I’m good at.”

Steph sighed and ran her fingers through her short hair. All these months, and he’d been watching her, probably close by the whole time. “So if you don’t want me dead, and knew I was looking for you, why did you stay away?” She didn’t mean to sound accusatory, but she’d been worried about him for months.

“I didn’t want to see you again until I’d figured out my own mind.”

Steph looked up at him again and let her hand drop to her side. His expression was sincere, determined.

“I couldn’t do that while I couldn’t even figure out if you were this or some skinny girl. I know you wanted to see me again, but I couldn’t until I was sure I’m not crazy.”

“You’re not…” she started to say, but then she looked down. Sure, she’d read the files and reports of everything Hydra had done to Bucky. All the mind wipes and conditioning, but she had no idea how that had to be for him. “So your memories have been coming back on their own?” She still didn’t meet his eyes.

“You triggered it.”

She looked up at that. His gaze was steady, blue eyes to blue eyes. “How?”

“ _Cause I’m with you til the end of the line,_ ” he quoted at her, the last thing she had said to him before this past night. “I had remembered you anyway, after our… second fight.”

“On the street?”

He nodded. “But they used the machine, wiped my mind. So I was clean, back on mission when I met you again. I had never really run into anyone from my past like that. They didn’t know it would have that kind of affect on me. Then I realized I did know you, and I had been trying to kill you. And I couldn’t let you die. But I didn’t know who I was, so I had to leave.”

“And now?” she asked quietly, barely a whisper.

“Now I realize my memories are correct. You were skinny, and small, but still strong. And then I didn’t see you for a while, but when we were reunited, you looked like this.” He tilted his head slightly, like he was judging whatever it was he wanted to say. “The first thing you did was kiss me.”

Steph sucked in a breath sharply. “You remember… How… how much else do you remember from the war?”

His eyes softened slightly. “I was the one who initiated the second kiss.”

Steph nodded, maybe a bit frantically. “Yeah. Yeah, you did.” She leaned up slightly, but then sat back down, afraid to scare him off.

However, he chose to move closer to her, first just a step, but then he crossed the distance between them and knelt down in front of her. She still had her back against the closed front door of the apartment, which meant she was at a disadvantage if he attacked, even though her shield was within reach. He reached out for her tentatively, like he thought maybe his touch would hurt her. He slowly slid his right hand along the side of her face, and she found herself leaning into it. God, she had missed this so much. She had missed him so much.

“Bucky…” she said softly.

“Steph…” he whispered, as he leaned forward to rest his forehead against hers.

Her eyes fluttered closed and she raised her hand to hold his against her face, keeping him there. She remembered these hands, well, this hand. All those years, and frozen for decades, and she never forgot. “I love you…” she said. “I never said it back then. But I love you. I’ve loved you since we were kids.”

He pulled back slightly, and she opened her eyes in reaction. He didn’t move his hand, as it was trapped under hers. He was barely inches away, and she could see every detail in those blue-gray eyes, that looked so confused now.

“I remember loving you. But I… I’m not sure I’m capable of it anymore.” He tilted his head forward just a bit, but it was enough that his long hair fell into his face.

So Steph reached up and brushed it back, while keeping her other hand over his. She traced her fingers along the edge of his jaw and along his cheek, and then she pulled him close. He came willingly and didn’t stop her when she kissed him. She kept him close when she pulled back to say, “I think you are capable, otherwise you wouldn’t have come to make sure I wasn’t injured, or saved me even when it contradicted your mission. Maybe it’s not the same, but I think we can get there again…” She opened her eyes and looked at him. His expression was curious, but neutral. “We did it once.”

“I’m not the same person.”

“Neither am I.”

He looked at her for a moment, considering what she said. “Sometimes I forget who I am, what I’m doing…”

“Then I’ll remind you.” She smiled softly. “I don’t care what I have to do. You are, and have always been, the most important person in my life. I will do anything for you. So please, stay with me.”

He watched her and didn’t move from where he was kneeling in front of her, still with his right hand on her cheek. Finally, he moved forward on his own and kissed her again, this time he tilted her head back slightly so he could press her against the back of the door.

She slid her hand up into his hair, and practically dragged him on top of her as she kissed him with much more vigour this time. While he traced her hip with his left hand, he didn’t push her for anything more, and she likewise didn’t try to proceed any further. The last time they had “gotten together,” she may have rushed things because she had been wanting to sleep with Bucky for years. This time, she was willing to take things slow.

So after several minutes of what she considered very good kissing, she gently pushed him back so she could look into his eyes. “I take that as a yes, then?”

The corner of his mouth quirked into something very similar to his old smirk. “Yes.” The smirk disappeared briefly. “But not all the time. I still need to figure out who I am now.”

Steph smiled. “I know. But I’ll be here for you. Always.” She looked into his eyes, searching for that old expression, the soft look he’d shown only her as the teenager he’d been eighty years ago. “Cause I’m with you til the end of the line.”

He smiled and kisses her again, once, softly. “Til the end of the line, then.”

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know. This trope has popped up a few times, and I decided to give it a go.


End file.
